Row, Row, Row Your Boat
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"Row, Row, Row Your Boat" is a nursery rhyme, and a popular children's song, often sung as a round. It can also be an 'action' nursery rhyme where singers sit opposite one another and 'row' forwards and backwards with joined hands. The tune is credited to Eliphalet Oram Lyte in the publication The Franklin Square Song Collection (1881, New York), which also indicates that he adapted the lyric:
- Row, row, row your boat,
- Gently down the stream.
- Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
- Life is but a dream.
The lyrics have often been used as a metaphor for life's difficult choices, and many see the boat as referring to one's self or a group which one identifies with. Rowing is a skillful, if tedious, practice that takes perfection but also directs the vessel. When sung as a group, the act of rowing becomes a unifier, as oars must be in sync in a rowboat. The idea that man travels along a certain stream, suggests boundaries in the path of choices and in free will. The third line recommends that challenges should be greeted in stride while open to joy with a smile. The final line, life is but a dream, is perhaps the most meaningful. In a religious setting, life and the physical plane can become a veil or dreamlike state that man must awake from. Conversely, the line can just as equally convey nihilist sentiments on the meaninglessness of man's actions.
[edit] Additional verses
- Row, row, row the boat
- Gently down the stream
- If you see a crocodile
- Don't forget to scream
- Row, row, row the boat
- Gently down the river
- If you see a polar bear
- Don't forget to shiver
- Row, row, row the boat
- Gently to the shore
- If you see a lion
- Don't forget to roar
- Row, row, row the boat
- Gently in the bath
- If you see a spider
- Don't forget to laugh
- Row, row, row the boat
- Gently as can be
- 'Cause if you're not careful
- You'll fall into the sea!
[edit] In popular culture
- It was sung by Captain Kirk and Leonard McCoy at the beginning of the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
- It appears in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
- It is named in A Series of Unfortunate Events as Violet Baudelaire's least favorite song. Lemony Snicket describes it as "a well known hymn of naval disaster".
- A fragment is sung by Lo Wang in the first level of Shadow Warrior.
- A fragment is sung by the virus during the attack on the Ellingson Mineral Corporation mainframe in the film Hackers
- In the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog episode "Robolympics", Sonic sings his version of the song.
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